Not so long ago I told you in detail why board games based on games are often a resounding failure, but this pattern has a downside. Digital adaptations of board games in most cases will suffer a similar fate, except not as sad for the consumer. While the creators of pointlessly expensive Kickstarter projects lure audiences with beautiful but completely unnecessary bling, digital versions of board games are developed more on a residual principle. Low budgets, unattractive appearance, absolute minimum care about quality. What’s the point of trying? All the same, such things will be bought mostly by the same board gamers who already own physical copies of the original games. And that’s only to be able to “lay out” your favorite board game from your cell phone in the subway.
This is neither good nor bad – it’s just one of the features of the market, from which there is no escape. But it’s all the more pleasant to see that there are exceptions to every rule: the PC version of the notorious Gloomhaven is one of them. After two years of development it will finally leave Steam’s Early Access in mid-October, but it’s worth a look before release, especially if you like thoughtful tactical strategy games, whether digital or desktop.
It’s not such a dark harbor
The original tabletop Gloomhaven, however, was also a rare exception to the unfortunate rule in its day. As a large and ambitious project funded through Kickstarter, it not only met but exceeded all expectations. Unemployed physicist Isaac Childress, who had previously created only one unremarkable game, tried to endow dashing Dungeons & Dragons-like dungeon races with a depth of mechanics more commonly found in complex economic simulators. And although at first glance these things are located at the opposite poles of gameplay design, the enthusiast somehow miraculously caught lightning in a bottle – Gloomhaven became a real sensation. If to explain on more understandable examples to gamers, it made about the same furor as the third “The Witcher”: the game was swept off the shelves so quickly that there were literally not enough copies for all comers. The first print run collected a relatively modest $ 400 thousand, and the second people have already brought $ 14 million. Moreover, in the four years since its release, the brainchild of Childress and his studio Cephalofair Games has grown into a full-fledged franchise with several spin-offs, comic books based on the motives, the future sequel and a succession of imitators.
Even the author himself can’t explain why the game became so successful, but I think the secret is in its scope: Gloomhaven feels like something between a mini-campaign in D&D and Diablo. Players take on the roles of mercenaries who have come together in Gloomhaven, a trading port on the fringes of civilization where there is plenty of work for desperate thugs. Political intrigue, border conflicts with local tribes, conspiracies of cultists, expeditions into the wild lands, search for ancient artifacts … In short, those who are not afraid to risk their lives and get their hands dirty, will have many chances to earn a happy old age. And at the same time to do a lot of good (or not so good) deeds.
Although “a lot” is not quite the right word. In the almost ten-kilogram box with the game there was so much content that personally it took me a year to go through the story to the end – not even to explore everything one hundred percent, but just to get to the final. And during that year, the game changed with every game: the world of Gloomhaven is constantly reacting to your actions. Plot forks open or close access to different scenarios, player decisions affect random events, the reputation of the group in the eyes of the locals and the prosperity of the town. Several generations of mercenaries change within the same group: when some characters fulfill a personal goal for which they have embarked on the path of adventure, they are replaced by others – from sealed envelopes that cannot be opened without permission. On the way to a mission you can easily stumble upon a side quest and immediately mark your find with a new sticker on the global map. Or suddenly meet a hero who left the team a few games ago and now lives his own life. As a result, two people who have gone through the story to the end can see completely different moments in a different order. I, for example, still haven’t opened all the mercenaries and resist the temptation to open the envelopes, although I’ve spent at least two, if not three hundred hours in the game.
There are a total of 16 characters available in the game, and quality goes hand in hand with quantity: all of them have some interesting mechanics or peculiarities. My favorite quartermaster, as a military intendant should, makes excellent use of equipment, and the sniper in the second screenshot hangs unique curses on enemies
BDSM for the brain
The PC version keeps up with the original in this regard. Of course, by the standards of board games, Gloomhaven’s level of interactivity is a really outstanding achievement, but it’s unlikely to impress gamers with a long experience: we’ve long since gotten used to such things and take them for granted. Besides, in the digital version the full-fledged story campaign, where all these elements are revealed as they should be, will appear only after the release, and I wanted to tell you about it not because of the story at all. In fact, behind the big ambitions of Gloomhaven lies a devilishly clever dungeon crawler, which even without any narrative in video game format works even better than on the table.
At first glance, things look pretty straightforward. The game is broken down into multiple scenarios, between which you travel across a global map. A scenario is a separate dungeon from a chain of rooms, where the mercenary squad needs to fulfill one or another goal. Clean the location from enemies, defeat the boss, stay alive for a certain number of rounds or take the treasure chest to your hands – in short, the standard program. The interesting part starts further: each character has a unique deck of abilities, but all cards in the deck have two effects. The lower ones, as a rule, are responsible for movement, defense and various buffs, and the upper ones – for attacks and healing. That’s why mercenaries play two cards each turn and choose the lower effect on one and the upper effect on the other.
As the heroes level up, they get new ability cards, and for an additional fee they can also be modified: add an additional property, slightly strengthen the effect
From the outside, such mechanics probably looks a little cumbersome, but, firstly, you get used to it quickly enough, and secondly, it deliberately makes you look for compromises. The abilities are distributed among the cards in such a way that in theory you can find a favorable combination for any situation, but it is unlikely to be ideal. For example, if you want to give yourself an extra unit of damage or push a monster into the nearest trap before a powerful attack, you won’t be able to move your character in the same turn. And for the attack, in turn, you have to pay for a chance to restore health or something else useful: for example, a buff that would help an ally. Defeated enemies leave behind coins, which can be used to buy equipment between scenarios, but in order to pick them up, you need to finish your turn exactly where the enemy died – or play an ability that allows you to attract gold from a distance. Otherwise, valuable loot will go to waste.
Card combinations must be planned carefully, calculating tactics for several rounds ahead. This is not the most trivial task, because in a single-player game you coordinate the moves of several characters with different decks. And in online co-op, where each player controls one mercenary, it becomes even harder – and much more interesting. All because of one small but sadistic detail: the rules of the game actually forbid the group to discuss the plan of action and selected cards in detail. You can only give your comrades a brief hint of what you’re going to do and when: I’m going to try to kill that zombie over there and break into the next room.
Proper positioning is the key to success. A divided squad will not achieve anything on its own and will only put the flanks under enemy attack
Of course, many people will probably simply forget about this ban while sitting with friends in Discord, but I advise you to at least try to play fair. The lack of information here is closely related to another aspect of tactics – timing. While the battles themselves are turn-based, the order in which mercenaries and monsters perform their actions depends on initiative. Each card has a single number printed on it, in addition to its properties, to indicate your initiative: the lower the number, the faster your turn will come. When you take two cards, you choose one of these numbers as your initiative before you start your turn. The problem is that you can’t see your opponents’ initiative in advance: their actions (how many squares they will move, how they will attack) are also dictated by the cards that are revealed at the same time as yours. That is, in the middle of the battle, you not only have to figure out which abilities are best to play, but also guess the moment – choose the right initiative number to strike early or, on the contrary, late.
If you slow down and don’t interfere with a couple of cultists in time, they’ll summon skeletons, and two or three of them will immediately turn into four or six – it won’t be easy to deal with such a horde. On the other hand, if you hurry up, you can inadvertently break your partner’s move and get into trouble… Or quickly slip away from the enemy attack, because the card AI monsters work according to strictly defined algorithms, which can and should be exploited. After all, who in their right mind would refuse a chance to throw a whole crowd of archers around your finger by simply stepping one cell to the side where they can’t reach you?
Opponents hurt, but in extreme cases you can buy off damage by dropping one card from your deck. The main thing is not to abuse this benefit, otherwise after a couple rounds there will be nothing to fight with
I agree, the combat sounds wildly busy, but in reality it’s the opposite: the fights feel unexpectedly dynamic, the pace doesn’t slacken. And there’s no time for it to slacken, because Gloomhaven has a hard timer built in by default – your stock of cards. Unlike many other games with deckbuilding elements, where you often have to wait for the right cards to appear, here you have the entire deck (which is small) in your hand from the very beginning of the battle. And when it runs out, you simply take it back… Except for one random card, which goes into the discard until the end of the mission: this is how mercenaries slowly but surely run out of energy. If at any point the entire deck goes into the discard, the character will instantly leave the dungeon and leave his comrades-in-arms in distress. With each scroll of the deck, you gradually lose options, moves get shorter, and there is less and less time to delay. An overly cautious group runs the risk of running out of steam halfway to the dungeon boss, while an overly brave group runs the risk of repeating Lyroy Jenkins’ feat and dying the death of a hero by gathering all the surrounding monsters into one long train.
The risk I took in opening the door to the new room with only two health points was calculated… But I’m bad at math
A quick adventure, back and forth
At first, these subtleties really aren’t easy to keep in your head. Timid attempts to complete tutorial scenarios will repeatedly end in resounding defeat, because the game is not shy about punishing mistakes, and one misstep often causes a domino effect. Once you get the hang of it, however, the heavy array of mechanics and nuances begin to weave together into a logical, elegant system, and Gloomhaven becomes damn near impossible to tear yourself away from. I’m not arguing that it requires a lot of perseverance and patience, but in return it offers a tactical puzzle that doesn’t get boring even after dozens of hours. In this respect, it reminds me a lot of Into the Breach: both games offer the player to solve approximately the same puzzle from time to time, and the game keeps adding new variables. New monsters, playable characters, abilities, equipment – even the landscape of the dungeon can seriously affect tactics.
Digital Gloomhaven is unlikely to have the same phenomenal success as the board game, but it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that more people than ever before can get to know the game, and that’s to everyone’s advantage. Regular gamers can affordably get their hands on a modern classic of the genre, or even pick up a new hobby after learning that Gloomhaven is a 1:1 scale port of the boardgame. And publishers now have a shining example on their hands that quality digital ports justify the money invested in them.
Maybe the onslaught of blatant hackwork made on the knees will at least slow down a bit. At least, the beginning of a reverse trend has been started.